After a superb day yesterday - blue skies, sunshine, warmth - which we promptly spent inside at MONA, the morning gave us grey skies, rain and mist. Not the best weather to try and see one of the great city views in the world. Mt Wellington looms directly over Hobart city but takes a surprisingly long time to get to. It's 1240 m high, so the top was shrouded in cloud when we started the 22km drive to the top. You can walk one of the various tracks to the top and we did think about it…joke…

While the weather was quite mild in the city, it was 10 deg cooler at the summit (it was a mere 10 deg there) and blowing a gale so with the wind chill factor it was more like about minus 5! The view though is fabulous, from upriver in the west all the way around to Bruny Island in the south-east. There is quite a complex of communication facilities and towers, and they must be packing a punch because the car remote locking system didn't work. Signs warned of possible inability to electronically lock and unlock cars - the first time we have encountered that.

We headed south from there to Huonville on the Huon River, a nice little town with excellent meat pies from the bakery. The countryside is lush and green and we travelled the dirt back roads which took us through State Forests. We found a great little forestry campsite at Arve River right next to the stream. It had toilets (flushing!), a short forest walk and fireplaces with supplied wood. What more could we want? Well, dry weather for a start. We put up a small tarp on poles next to the fire to shelter us from the drizzle while cooking and eating. A German couple arrived in a hired campervan and we invited them to share the fire, then a single Australian fellow, then a young French couple. When it started to rain more heavily it became quite a squeeze under the 6'x4' tarp, but the fire was so hot it kept going regardless. Many wines later we retired somewhat later than we had planned.